25 August 2017

How did the Reformation change the Church?

31 October 1517 – the day the
Reformation began. According to some,
Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to
the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church
in defiance of the Pope, and the rest is
history.

Well, perhaps. Actually it’s not entirely clear
that he did it himself rather than sending a servant. It was a perfectly normal way of
communicating – a bit like blogging. And it took a little while before the implications
of the 95 short statements –about how the
Pope couldn’t forgive sins through granting
indulgences – really sank in.

Furthermore, Luther wasn’t the first or the
only Reformer. Still, 31 October is as good a date as any to mark the beginning of a
movement that changed not just the Church
but the world. This is how it happened.

1. It gave us the Bible.

The Reformers believed in going back to
the scriptures. While the Catholic Church set
store by tradition, the Reformers believed in
going back to the source. So, their scholars
and pastors read the Bible intensively, and as printing and literacy spread they
encouraged their people to do so too.

They preached from the Bible and wanted
everyone to understand it, so they translated
it; the Catholic Church believed the Bible
was dangerous in untrained hands.

Evangelicals’ love of scripture comes straight from the Reformation, because the
Reformers taught that scripture alone was
authoritative. Hence the famous words of
William Tyndale, strangled and burned at the
stake for translating the Bible into English: “I
defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare
my life, ere many yeares I will cause a boy
that drives the plough to know more of the
scripture than he does.”

2. It gave us spiritual freedom.

Luther’s key insight was that salvation was
by faith alone. He wasn’t the first or the only
one to realise that, but because he was a
brilliant writer, speaker and publicist, his
books and pamphlets spread very quickly.
It’s not up to the Pope or his ministers to
forgive sins, he said – we trust God and we
are saved.

In the Church of the day, forgiveness was
obtained through doing penance – acts of
charity, prayers, or self-punishment that
were supposed to reinforce an inward
repentance and were inseparable from it.

Luther used to torment himself – and irritate
his confessor – because he thought he
hadn’t done enough penance to be saved.
But then he realised that salvation wasn’t
about what we do, but about what Christ
has done.

This was radical because it cut out the middle man. Anyone, without the
intervention of a priest, could repent and be saved. It was also threatening to
the authorities: the sale of indulgences – effectively tickets to heaven – was an
industry bringing in huge revenues to the
Church. Luther was hitting the Pope in his
pocket.

3. It gave us religious freedom.

Which is not quite the same thing. Before
the Reformation, the Church was in charge
of spirituality. The Catholic Church, which
controlled religion in the West, defined
right and wrong theology. It exercised political power through Catholic rulers who
all acknowledged – grudgingly, in quite a
few cases – that the Pope had some kind of
authority over them. After the Reformation,
that changed, though it took a while – many
Protestant countries were just as intolerant
as Catholic ones. Real freedom of religion
was a long way off and in the beginning only
the strange Anabaptists taught it – but the
Catholic Church’s monopoly was broken.

That led to a flowering of theology not just
among Protestants, but among Catholics
too. They had to think about why they
believed what they believed, and to be able to defend it – so the quality of debate
jumped all round. It was the beginning of a
free market in religion, and everyone had to
try to improve their product.

4. It gave us democracy.

The Reformation began as a protest against
authority. Luther was deeply opposed to
violent rebellion and wrote a truly horrible
pamphlet urging rulers to put down a
peasants’ revolt with fire and sword. But
others were perfectly prepared to resist
unjust authority. They read in the Bible
about God’s judgment on wicked kings and
were willing to take up arms against them.

It didn’t always end well – Zwingli died at
Kappel in a battle against Catholic forces,
and several others came to sticky ends.
Many Continental Protestant countries had
absolute and authoritarian monarchies even
so, but in England it was the children of the
Reformation who chopped King Charles’s
head off and gave Britain a true parliament.

Recognising the importance of the
individual’s conscience was a step on the
way to recognising the importance of the
individual’s rights. As the Leveller Thomas
Rainsborough said at the famous Putney
Debates in 1647: ‘I think that the poorest he
that is in England hath a life to live, as the
greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s
clear, that every man that is to live under a
government ought first by his own consent
to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in
England is not bound in a strict sense to that
government that he hath not had a voice to
put himself under.’

5. It gave us fresh temptations.

The Reformation was a wonderful gift from
God in which precious truths that had been
hidden for generations were discovered and
shared with the world. But it also meant the destruction of the old systems of authority.
Everyone could read the Bible and interpret
it for themselves, so Protestantism was – and
is – vulnerable to new heresies growing up.

And human nature is inherently sinful, so the
Reformers themselves, and the movements
they inspired, were flawed too. Luther wrote
anti-semitic tracts; Zwingli had the great
Anabaptist Balthasar Hubmaier racked to
get him to change his mind about baptism;
Calvin demanded the death of Michael
Servetus for denying the Trinity (though, to
be fair, he wanted him beheaded rather than
burned, his actual fate).

We should rejoice in the Reformation and
praise God for the reformers – but we should
acknowledge where they went wrong, too.

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